Written by 3X WEST
As a company, we are always iterating. Sometimes changes will come about gradually and organically, but every once in a while we make a big intentional leap forward to set new standards or practices in place that will carry us forward for the foreseeable future. When we set about to launch a new product in January 2022, this was one of these moments. It was our first proper “studio” launch since Transfixed in 2018, with our focus for the last four years having been on more sporadic and limited-run series & films under Adult Time. Our primary goal was to create a very all-encompassing product that would have broad appeal and could house any number of cool ideas and exciting production opportunities (like unusual sex acts, new story & trend explorations, niche casting choices, and similar) all under one roof.
But with this new studio, we also seized the opportunity to take a look back at our content, production, and branding practices from the past years and identify some additional areas of optimization to explore. After all, this was our chance to work with a completely clean slate – with no set audience expectations or habits formed on our end that would be the usual barriers to making big changes. And so we started to write out our wishlist of everything we wanted to do differently for Modern-Day Sins, what areas of the status quo we wanted to challenge or at least move the needle on. What did we envy about other teams or studios that we had always wanted to try ourselves, but didn’t have the right conditions to make happen?
This wishlist became not only a defining element of developing our vision for what this new product launch would eventually look like, but it also became somewhat of a blueprint for the projects that followed. Beyond just providing us with a new vehicle for content that has come to be some of our most-watched on the platform, Modern-Day Sins also set several precedents for our content and production philosophy that we have since adopted across many of our other brands. In spotlighting Modern-Day Sins, we would be remiss not to also spotlight the influences it’s had on our approach and decisions more than two years since its inception.
A Sex-First Product
We’re a porn company, so of course sex is a huge priority for us! But we have often defined our competitive edge as our storytelling, and to consistently deliver kick-ass story intros we often have to devote more time to shooting story sequences on the day of production than to shooting the sex. This is a compromise that we have always accepted as a necessary evil in past launches, but for Modern-Day Sins we decided to flip the script (figuratively AND literally!) and think of the brand as a sex-first, story-second series. The scriptwriting process, like I said, was flipped on its head – we spent more creative brainstorming, writer focus, and even page count towards perfecting the scripted sex elements for each episode, and tried to keep narrative elements trimmed down (at least compared to OUR other productions) so that the crew and talent would know to show the characters spending less time talkin’ and more time fuckin’.
It may seem like such a small deal to you fair readers, but it was really unprecedented in how we had approached content before now. It required re-educating our crews (for whom we had hammered home for years prior about the importance of storytelling in our shoots), drafting a completely new script template that gave more weight to visually and sexually explicit sections, and emphasizing the importance of showing off the interesting and unusual sex on display within our thumbnails and trailers.
Luckily, this work to rewire our mindsets has not gone to waste! Since Modern-Day Sins, we have strived for a more even balance between story-driven and sex-driven content in recent launches. Series like Lez Be Bad, UP CLOSE, and Femboyish to name just a few, have all followed in the footsteps of Modern-Day Sins’ sex-first footsteps. And, we’ve gotten better at identifying ways to streamline the story production process – such as Lez Be Bad’s voiceovers and Femboyish’s stylish tease intros – to still be able to include compelling fantasy scenarios into these products without compromising the time spent on set capturing sex footage.
Gender-Neutral Branding
Our history as a company may have started with original imprints like “All Girl Massage” and “Girlsway”, but these types of product names can be a double-edged sword. While they have the benefit of being very to-the-point about what they offer, it also limits our ability to expand these brands into other markets later on if we see potential interest. Would it make much sense to have to launch series clones for every new offshoot we wanted to try, like “All Trans Massage” or “Gaysway”? Or wouldn’t it be smarter to develop brands that are equally provocative-sounding but don’t fall into the pitfall of being gender-specific? That way, even if a brand started off focusing on one particular sexuality or preference, it nonetheless wouldn’t stop us from later producing for other audiences even if we had no immediate plans to do so.
And so, for Modern-Day Sins we set about to make the studio name – as well as all the 7 Sinful Series that fell under its umbrella – use gender-neutral naming conventions that could work for every sexual preference equally. “Anal Envy”, “Cum Gluttons”, “Greedy Creampies”, “Idle Fantasies”, “Lust Triangles”, “Mad Fuckers”, and “Proud Pervs” all manage to sizzle with sin as they sell the lewdness of their concepts, without any of the unnecessarily restrictive baggage of locking things down to one preference only. And to prove that point, we released Modern-Day Sins with content for all 5 of our major audiences – straight, lesbian, trans, bisexual, and gay. We don’t expect that most viewers are going to watch all or even more than one of these at a time, but it nonetheless allows fans of the series to bond over a shared love for the same series on Adult Time which is a great thing for content discourse and brand recognition to spread faster across the web.
We don’t follow this same approach for every new series – some, like “Lez Be Bad” and “Heteroflexible”, are designed with a very specific niche or audience in mind that wouldn’t translate well to other markets – but asking ourselves this question is now one of our first considerations when launching a new project. Series like “Oopsie!”, “Accidental Gangbang”, “UP CLOSE”, “Dare We Share?”, “Forbidden Seductions”, and plenty more have been engineered with neutral names to give the products more flexibility in pairings and a universal relevance for consumers of all types.
Broadening Casting
At the time of Modern-Day Sins’ conception, our product mix was proving… let’s say, “not ideal” for our goals to grow strong relationships with talent of various ages, body types, and creative leanings. Many series had strict casting requirements – such as teens-only for Webyoung, mature women for Mommy’s Boy, or trans & cis lesbian pairings for Transfixed; while others had sensitive subject matter or out-of-the-ordinary sex acts like Pure Taboo, Nuru Massage, and Asshole Fever that not every talent might be comfortable performing. When you factored in other creative constraints we care about like pairing chemistry, acting ability, story considerations, “physical resemblance” for family roleplay content, and the like – it was often difficult to get opportunities to shoot with talent who maybe didn’t tick one or two of the many boxes we needed them to.
Modern-Day Sins was designed with a wider range of themes and focuses, expressly so that we could cast (pun intended) a wider net when it came to talent we were interested in working with. And not only did that free us up from some of the constraints we were finding ourselves tangled up in, but it also opened the door to exploring some avenues of casting that we were already looking for an excuse to pursue. For instance, heavily tattooed models tended to be more polarizing on Adult Time, largely because of the nature of products that built its foundations – members seemed to prefer the “natural beauties” of All Girl Massage and 21Naturals, or the suburban-y “girl next doors” of Girlsway and Pure Taboo. But launching a new product that could start fresh, without audience expectations or established conventions, gave us more wiggle room to book talent like Vanessa Vega, Arabelle Raphael, and Rocky Emerson – who, surprise surprise, happen to star in some of our most popular episodes from the studio!
And all these same reasonings also empowered us to strive for more racial diversity within the content as well. Pornstars of color sadly tend to get the short end of the stick for a number of reasons in our industry, and when you add in all the casting complexities I described above it can often lead to an unintended bias that leads to fewer booking opportunities. We wanted to challenge ourselves to do better, and so we made a conscious effort to script and book Modern-Day Sins scenes with a higher frequency of both male and female pornstars of color.
We continue to this day to challenge ourselves to not get complacent with casting and bringing more variety of body types and racial diversity to our roster over time. Series with less heavy booking considerations like Oopsie!, Devil’s Film, Fantasy Massage, and Jerk Buddies have been among our best demonstrations of taking this commitment of ours to heart, and we are making more steps every day towards growing our talent pool and forging new connections with talent of all ages and backgrounds.
…And Too Many More To Count!
Several other practices that started with Modern-Day Sins have since branched out to impact our other brands. Our heightened attention to set and wardrobe styling spilled out from Modern-Day Sins into Oopsie! and is now one of the linchpins of that brand’s success; storyboarding, which was not in our habit to do often before Modern-Day Sins, has since extended to other visually heavy productions such as our animated projects; the raunchy, keyword-heavy scene titles that we started using for the series have inspired us to try the same approach on Femboyish; and the list goes on.
In a modern world where the aesthetics of pleasure are continually being pushed and redefined, it’s up to us to stay not only afloat but ahead of the curve to succeed. Modern-Day Sins has helped us set our future up for success by instilling ourselves with a whole new set of tools and values to shape our content for the better, and cover more ground. The fact that this series also has managed to strike a chord with so many viewers is just the icing on the cake at that point, but we certainly won’t complain!
Click here to watch a full Modern-Day Sins scene for free!
